Schools add ‘cli-fi’ lit to push climate change

By Cheryl Chumley

Schools are starting to rely on "cli-fi," or climate fiction, to press political points.
Schools are starting to rely on “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, to press political points.

Schools around the country have been bringing into their fold of approved reading curriculum a new type of literature, “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, that presses the climate change agenda via popular fiction.

“It’s a very, very energized time for this where people in literature have just as much to say as people who are in hard science fields, or technology and design fields, or various social-science approaches to these things,” said Jennifer Wicke, and English professor at the University of Virginia’s who’s heading to the Bread Load campus at Middlebury College in Vermont to teach a course on climate fiction this June, Breitbart reported.

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The Bread Loaf School of English provides training for students who wish to go into teaching at both elementary and high-school levels. In other words: those attending this “cli-fi” course will likely incorporate what they learn into their own course curriculum when they begin teaching.

“This course gives them a model for creating and imagining English courses that will help the young people whom they teach understand that reading literature, looking at the arts, looking at film, isn’t something you do as an aside,” said Bread Loaf school director Emily Bartels, who also serves as an English professor at Rutgers University, Breitbart said. “It’s something you do as you learn how to navigate your own moment in the 21st century.”

Climate fiction and its weaving into places of higher education isn’t just a domestic occurrence.

Breitbart also reported about three dozen scholars are set to attend a workshop in Germany with this title: “Between Fact and Fiction: Climate Change Fiction.”

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

One former professor who worked at Hampshire College and now has a novel coming out with an eco-friendly marine theme, said people are more willing to look at climate change in context of a fictional setting than scientific classroom.

“You have to make people care,” said the professor, Charlene D’Avanzo, Breitbart reported.

Cheryl Chumley

Cheryl K. Chumley is a journalist, columnist, public speaker and author of "The Devil in DC." and "Police State USA: How Orwell's Nightmare is Becoming our Reality." She is also a journalism fellow with The Phillips Foundation in Washington, D.C., where she spent a year researching and writing about private property rights. Read more of Cheryl Chumley's articles here.


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